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Top scientists predict the future of science

FOR PROPHETIC visions of the future, some people turn to horoscopes or fortune tellers. But if you really want to know what the future holds, ask a scientist.

Not just a renowned, seasoned scientist, but a fresh mind, someone who is asking themselves the questions that will define the next generation of scientific thought.

That’s precisely what Max Brockman has done in this captivating collection of essays, written by “rising stars in their respective disciplines&colon; those who, in their research, are tackling some of science’s toughest questions and raising new ones”.

The result is a medley of big ideas on topics ranging from cosmology and climate change, to morality and cognitive enhancement.

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The collection is diverse, but one theme resounds&colon; when it comes to the human race, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. We owe our evolutionary success to our unique modes of social behaviour.

Social species

In their essay “Out of our minds”, journalist Vanessa Woods and anthropologist Brian Hare suggest that it wasn’t intelligence that led to social behaviour, but rather social behaviour that paved the way for the evolution of human intelligence. “Humans got their smarts only because we got friendlier first,” they write.

We are a social species, and we have our brains to thank. As Harvard University neuroscientist Jason Mitchell writes&colon; “The most dramatic innovation introduced with the rollout of our species is not the prowess of individual minds, but the ability to harness that power across many individuals.”

Language allows us to do this in an unprecedented way – it serves as a vehicle for transferring one’s own mental states into another’s mind. Lera Boroditsky – a professor of psychology, neuroscience and symbolic systems at Stanford University – has an interesting piece about the ways in which our native language shapes the way we think about such basic categories as space, time and colour.

Mirror, mirror in my brain

We also connect to other minds via mirror neurons – those copycat brain cells that echo other people’s actions and emotions from within the confines of our own skulls.

Mirror neurons allow us to learn from one another’s experiences and to see the world through foreign eyes – a neurological feat that seems to lie at the basis of so much of what it is to be human.

Through mirror neurons, “our experiences fuse into the joint pool of knowledge that we call culture,” writes neuroscientist Christian Keysers of the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. “With the advent of language, books and television, this sharing becomes global, allowing us to exchange experiences across time and space.”

Moral evolution?

Mirror neurons are thought to be the seat of empathy, so our brains, you might say, are wired for morality.

But our social brains evolved in small, localised communities, and as the pace of technological innovation accelerates, global communication increasingly becomes a fact of daily life. Will communications technologies lead us to evolve a broader moral sense?

Joshua Greene, a cognitive neuroscientist and philosopher at Harvard, explains why humans are apt to save a child who is dying right in front of their eyes, but not a child who is dying halfway across the world.

“Nature endowed us with tuggable heartstrings, a crucial design feature for creatures whose survival depends on cooperation. But nature couldn’t foresee that our survival might someday depend on cooperation across oceans and continents, and so neglected to outfit us with heartstrings that are readily tugged from a distance,” he writes.

Forecasting the future

For an example of the power of social behaviour, we need look no further than this book. While each essay is its own gem, together they form a remarkable dialogue about what it is to be human now, and what it will be in the future.

So what is next? The suggestions are as varied as they are intriguing.

According to Laurence Smith, professor of earth and space sciences at University of California, Los Angeles, dramatic rises in temperature due to global warming are set to sweep across the high latitudes, transforming “land that is hardly livable into land that is somewhat livable”. As climate change escalates, might we someday find ourselves migrating to the once frozen north?

In his piece The Aliens Among Us, biologist Nathan Wolfe argues that scientists need to catalogue the global diversity of viruses and identify those that are actually beneficial to the organisms they infect.

Doing so, he says, will offer us a better understanding of human health and disease, the biology of our planet, the future of pandemics and the environment – even what real alien life might look like.

Sticky ideas

In a particularly fascinating essay, UCLA psychologist Matthew Lieberman suggests that as we come to better understand the structure and function of our brains, we may also come to understand our most basic beliefs.

Big ideas, he says – the kind that shape human thought for decades, even centuries – “stick” because they match the structure and function of our brains.

As an example, Lieberman looks at Cartesian dualism&colon; the idea that mind and body are two different kinds of things, one material, the other something else. Despite being widely discredited by philosophers and scientists, mind-body dualism is one of those infuriatingly sticky ideas.

Why? Because the brain processes information about bodies in a separate way than it does information about minds, argues Lieberman. That is, our underlying neural plumbing happens to deal with bodies and minds as two different categories of being – leading, perhaps, to a mistaken philosophical assumption that they truly are two different categories of being.

Time to think

My favourite piece was Brain Time by neuroscientist David Eagleman at the Baylor College of Medicine.

Experiments, he says, have shown that our brain’s perception of time is remarkably malleable. This raises the deeper and endlessly thorny question of how we can disentangle neuroscience from physics.

Echoing Einstein, who referred to time as “a stubbornly persistent illusion”, Eagleman writes&colon; “Our physical theories are mostly built on top of our filters for perceiving the world, and time may be the most stubborn filter of all to budge out of the way.”

When thinking about what’s next, I can’t help but suspect that, as we venture deeper into fundamental physics and deeper into the mysteries of consciousness, it will become increasingly important to distinguish what are features of a real, external reality – assuming such a thing exists at all – from artifacts of the structures and functions of our brains.

Fundamental questions

In asking questions about the inner workings of our brains we inevitably run into questions about the outer workings of the universe. So what’s next for cosmology?

According to Stephon Alexander, a physicist at Haverford College, Pennsylvania, it all comes down to this question&colon; what is dark energy, that furtive antigravitational stuff that seems to be accelerating the universe’s expansion?

Alexander wonders if the answer lies in our most basic assumptions about how reality works, and in the silent tension that resides between the scientific programmes of reduction and emergence.

Perhaps, he speculates, a new level of relativity – in which both observers and fundamental particles are no longer absolute, invariant features of the world – is needed to understand the dark-energy puzzle.

“A physical consequence would be that matter can create space and space may curve itself into matter,” Alexander writes. It’s delicious food for thought.